Convertibility (W3C compliant documents can be easily converted to other formats including database and word document.);

Stability (W3C codes ensure both forward and backward compatibility which helps the data written in old standard to work in newer browsers.);

Universality (W3C standards-compliant coding ensures that each developer easily understand the existing coding conventions and the new designers also pick up where their predecessors left off.)

Still, the criticism in webmaster and SEO communities does take place:

many of the standards are too old and are based on the last century realia (e.g. according to W3C any page limit is twenty kilobytes which is not necessary to conform to with today’s high-speed Internet connections);

the market is moving many times faster than the W3C committee (e.g. mobile Internet which evolves too fast for both W3C and Google to compile);

some of W3C tools are often broken or too slow which is unacceptable when speaking about the committee aiming at standardized www;

standards have a tendency to “stifle creativity“, never allowing web developers to push the boundaries of what is acceptable in order to see what might be accomplished outside the rules.

So my main question is: is checking a website against W3C validity part of your on-site diagnostics? Do you still care? Do you pay attention to all errors or only to to major ones (skipping what you deem unimportant)?

&lt;a href=”http://answers.polldaddy.com/poll/896565/” &gt;Do You Evaluate A Site With W3C Validator as Part of On-Site SEO Diagnostics?&lt;/a&gt; &lt;br /&gt; &lt;span style=”font-size:9px;”&gt; (&lt;a href=”http://www.polldaddy.com”&gt; polls&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/span&gt;

Ann Smarty is the blogger and community manager at Internet Marketing Ninjas. Ann's expertise in blogging and tools serve as a base for her writing, tutorials and her guest blogging project, MyBlogGuest.com.

It was fun earlier to steal link juice from w3c lists … getting your site to pagerank 7 or 8 without much effort but it does not work any more … pity for all that linkjuice wasted at w3c.Ann as usual your article rocks and it is very smart, ahead of curve… and if I would not be married I would try to date you.

I just wrote about this in my blog, so I’m curious to see what people will say.

In my opinion, W3C validation and SEO aren’t very closely related. Sure, W3C validation is important and everyone should try to have code as clean and validated as possible. However, a site with minimum code bloat, crawl-able code and relevant content will compete at the same level with its replica for a page validated with no errors. W3C should be emphasized by web developers, to ensure usability amongst different browsers and maximum “code cleanliness”, but when it comes to SEO it’s not a pending factor.

ps: heck, check searchenginejournal.com’s validation – many errors, some warnings, but you guys seem to be doing ok with your SEO 😉

I use W3C validation to make sure that the user experience isn’t going to be a bad one. There are people out there who use outdated browsers (IE6 for example), and if the page does not render well for those people, you may not get them back.

It may not be a big part of SEO, but I still consider user experience a high priority when I am building and optimizing sites. You can have the best SERP on the web, but if the user’s browser won’t render your site properly, what’s the use?

W3C compliance in no way affects search engine visibility — not where the major search engines are concerned.

This is an easy topic to get burned on, and probably most people in the SEO community who have discussed it HAVE been burned for it.

There is no direct correlation with or benefit for SEO in adhering to W3C compliance, which only extends to a subset of documents that SEOs have to work with anyway.

I DO recommend W3C compliance for accessibility and because standards are a good thing in general, but we’re going to be working with non-HTML documents and non-W3C compliant HTML documents for years to come.

No matter if W3C compliance affects or not search engine visibility, I recommend to avoid promoting the idea that valid HTML is a useless practice. Otherwise the web industry will never ever recover from the incompetence it already has to deal with.

In addition I wanted to mention here that I upgraded my web site doctype to XHTML+RDFa, and diverse browsers have problems with just one single markup error. I am wondering how bots would deal with that. Any thoughts?

If a site validates to the strictest of W3C validation, it is semantically correct. It’s been proven that the SEs prefer a semantically written page. It relays the information faster, cleaner, and easier to read. I’ve done testing myself on websites with identical content, one W3C valid and one not. The W3C valid site placed higher every time. In a competitive keyword situation I know my W3C valid site has a better chance at the top spot.

This is a good questions. Personally I am the kind of person that wants my site or sites to validate regardless. I just can’t stand the idea of there being an error even if the average person can’t see it.

However my experience has shown me that most minor validation error have little impact on search ranking or SEO in general.

Proven heh? … I’d like to see the proof … I know for a fact 18 nationally ranking web sites that were all written in spaghetti code by many different developers … However, every one of these sites are to this day number one for lot’s of keywords …

I know that sites rank without validation because I was the person pushing to have the sites updated … the fact is … the company had no reason to update them … they ranked …

Though I am a strong advocate of standards compliance and support validation for usability …

As far as search engines ‘preferring’ sites that validate … that’s an interesting one … have you ever seen a web site in Lynx? …

Did he say “In a competitive keyword situation I know my W3C valid site has a better chance at the top spot.” ?

Well then I think he did not pose the issue properly. He should have probably said:

“In a competitive keyword situation I know my marked up correctly site has a better chance at the top spot. That means I use headings correctly, utilize at least the h1, h2 and h3 tags and I make sure the content of each is related in the semantic outline.”

Florida_S I might smacked of facetiousness and sarcasm at best …, but that because you drawed the web site of a poster here to prove that he is wrong about something. And that is not nice practice. As you see I did not draw your site into this thread telling what you might doing very wrong. (If you think you would like to bring my site into this discussion, I definitely won’t have a problem with that).

Also, I am not attempting to qualify as substantive evidence, since if I am not talking in my last posts about W3C markup validation.

Once again:“In a competitive keyword situation I know my marked up correctly site has a better chance at the top spot. That means I use headings correctly, utilize at least the h1, h2 and h3 tags and I make sure the content of each is related in the semantic outline.”

Marked up correctly, does not mean valid markup.

I will give you an example of an incorrect marked up or of a not semantically outlined page:

1. A page has “h2″ headings, and does not have an “h1″ tag.

2. The markup of the footer of a page comes first after the “body” tag or somewhere close to the top, instead of being the last markup of the page.

Validated code is a benefit for many reasons. With hundreds of factors determining your rankings, this is most likely one of them. It probably has a very small impact, but is a factor none the less. Why disregard any factor that could effect rankings, especially in competitive markets. Not to mention gaining all those other benefits of validated code.

Those other sites mentioned that have spaghetti code and still rank well, I am willing to bet that other algo factors are overriding the crappy code. Again, I doubt validation has a rather large impact on rankings unless most of the other factors are rather equal.

There are many others aspects of code on a site that have more of an impact than validation, but why in the world would you not make sure it was not an issue, just in case it became a factor.

Many times its a company’s decision not to fix, based on financial, time or resource requirements. This is completely understandable and I would not aggressively push to have it fixed in that case. However, I would always make sure they understood the potential issues related to that decision.

@Edward: Sorry buddy, I cant buy the argument: I know it’s wrong, but I wont fix until someone proves it wrong. Give me a call when you get a chance.

I am relatively new in the field of SEO, so I do lots of research on different topics. I have seen lots of websites rank well, without W3C validation. There are also a lot number of sites with lots of html errors. So, I think now a days, site owners don’t emphasize much on W3C Recommendations.

the information is very educative and very precise. I must appreciate. The standards are always good to follow and this is in the interest of professionals as well clients.syed Alileading- solutions interfacecanada